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Esterina Zuccarone was born in Foggia, in southern Italy, into a family of seven daughters and one son. In 1912 her family moved to Turin, joining the flow of migrants from the South to the North of Italy that, in those years, involved many people. The transition from a rural to an industrial society allowed Esterina to grow up with more emancipated female role models, starting with her older sisters who, in the new urban environment, decided to leave home to find work (de Miro d’Ayeta 2007, 229). In particular, one of her sisters started working in one of the numerous local textile mills, allowing the young Esterina to familiarize herself with skills such as precision, sense of proportion, and attention to detail, which were necessary to produce good quality and stylish garments.

Very few women were involved in the early itinerant cinema business and Marie de Kerstrat was certainly one of the most singular figures in the field, having dropped from the social standing of a French countess to become the manager of a traveling show in eastern Canada and the United States. Her profile opens interesting questions to historians of cinema, as well as historians of the women’s life; for the Montreal based historian Chantal Savoie, women of this era had to constantly negotiate and compromise as a means of acceptance within the field they wanted to develop (2003, 196). Marie de Kerstrat was a good example of this situation, as well as another early Montreal woman film pioneer Emma Gendron.

With a film career spanning over four decades—from a vaudeville dancer in an early Edison actuality and a silent comic film actress to an independent producer in the 1920s and a character actor in talkies in the 1930s— Cissy Fitzgerald experienced the vicissitudes of early film history. Born on February 1, 1873, christened Marie Kathleen Cecilia Fitzgerald, and educated in a British convent, Fitzgerald was already famous for her stage dancing and coquettish wink when she made her first screen appearance in 1896. Best known as “The Girl With the Wink,” Fitzgerald primarily worked in theater until her transition to comedic film acting in 1914. She appeared in multiple, trans-Atlantic runs of “The Gaiety Girl,” “The Foundling,” and “The Family.” Although she only appeared in one film role prior to 1914, an Edison Vitascope recording of her dance act in a Boston Keith-Albee show, her stage personality radiated cinematic qualities. From her saucy lingerie dancing to her gleefully incessant winking, Fitzgerald integrated bodily displays with the act of looking while most films were still shot in static, long-framed, proscenium views.

Jenny Strömberg was the first woman credited in filmmaking in Finland for her appearance in the film Släpjakt/Drag Hunt (1908). She arranged the filmed event and appeared in the film as herself, and was the only one mentioned by name in the adverts and reviews of the film. Her drag hunts initiated the making of the film, and she led the hunt on horseback, but most likely she had nothing to do with the actual filmmaking. There are also no hints about her participation in financing the filmmaking or other tasks associated with the traditional role of producer. Nevertheless, she was promoting the hunt dogs that appeared in the film and her husband was among the wealthiest businessmen in Finland, which means that she could have financed the film, if it was needed.

After her success as a film critic, novelist, and co-founder of the London Film Society in 1925, Iris Barry’s career took a major downturn in the fall of 1930. She ran afoul of her employer, Lord Rothermere, publisher of the Daily Mail, when she panned the Elinor Glyn film Knowing Men (1930). Although Glyn was well-known as a romantic novelist and screenwriter, Barry found her film to have been made on “an abysmally low level” (qtd. in Sitton 2014, 145). Rothermere took Glyn to dinner on opening night and, without consulting Barry, promised her a favorable review. The next day Iris received a check for the balance of her contract: “No questions. No excuses. No job” (Sitton 145). Native product had long been under siege at the box office by American competitors and Iris also suspected she had proven less a fan of British films than Rothermere expected.

Emma Gendron was probably the main female figure in Quebec during the silent film era, but her importance appeared only recently along with new research about the early cinema and its centennial. Ongoing research about her career as a screenwriter will probably also reveal more about her motion picture film activity, but she is now recognized as the first important screenwriter in Quebec. She wrote at least two scripts that were brought to the screen by her probable lover, Joseph-Arthur Homier—Madeleine de Verchères (1922), a biopic about a New France heroine, and La drogue fatale (1924), a thriller in which the drug mafia kidnaps the police chief’s daughter. Gendron might have written other scripts and might also have been more involved in directing these films, but nothing is proven as the films, and along with most of the relevant paper archives, were destroyed.

Elsa Chauvel had strong opinions about a woman’s role in both work and life. In an interview in 1934, she explained that a woman should charm men and a wife should support her husband (28). Her own life exemplified these principles. She was born Elsie May Wilcox in 1898 in Collingwood, Victoria, Australia. She was the second child and only daughter of itinerant Irish-born actor Edward Wilcox and his wife Ada Maria (née Worrall). When Elsie was about five years old, the Wilcox family moved to South Africa. Edward Wilcox, under the stage name Silveni/Sylvaney, became the actor-manager of a touring theatrical company. From a young age, Elsie’s brother Kyrle performed under the stage name McAllister, and Elsie herself performed under the stage name Sylvaney. They began with juvenile roles, but were soon being made and dressed up to play older characters.

“For me theater has been and still is my passion, the only passion of my life, alive, strong, burning like a fever, and even if it has cost me a lot of sacrifices and a lot of pain, it has procured for me many joys and satisfactions” (“Fabienne Fabrèges” 6). In these words, Fabienne Fabrèges explains the emotional energy that accompanied her throughout her career, which, at first, led her to tour the major theaters of Europe as a theatre actress, and then into performing in more than sixty motion pictures. Fabrèges is one of a generation of young “modern” women who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, were able to move beyond the fixed roles (legislative, cultural and symbolic) imposed upon them in Western society, to pursue their careers (Guerra 2008, 39-48), even if that meant sacrificing family life. In this interview she is remembering the tenacity that she had to maintain during her struggles in order to achieve her objectives, which is also why reviewers generally recognized her as a cultured, intelligent actress with a personal and accurate way of playing her roles.

Mary Manning was one of a handful of women active behind the camera in Ireland’s two waves of silent film production. Between 1914 and 1926, a prolific mass-market industry specialized in popular film genres like historical melodramas and romantic comedies and dramas. Ellen O’Mara Sullivan (co-founder of and producer at Film Company of Ireland, 1914-1920), Margaret T. Pender (source writer, O’Neil of the Glen, 1916), Ulster novelist Mrs. N. F. Patton (adapter, Knocknagow, 1918), and Dorothy Donn-Byrne (source writer, Land of Her Fathers, 1925) were the female pioneers in this first wave. Between 1930 and 1935, a second silent industry produced more experimental, less commercial films, extending this second silent era well beyond the 1927 advent of sound in the U.S and much of Europe. In addition to Manning, women filmmakers included Lettice Ramsey and British- born Frances Baker Farrell who designed sets (Some Say Chance, 1934) and Gate Theatre actress Maírín Hayes who edited (Guests of the Nation, 1935). Scholars offer few details on Manning’s contribution in this second wave, though she appears to have been one of the driving forces behind five of the six films produced. In her brief, but significant film career, Manning was a screenwriter, adapter, director, assistant director, and actress who also worked on props and casting. In addition, she was a film critic and a founding member of an art house film society and an amateur filmmaking club.

In histories of early Chinese cinema, Pu Shunqing is only mentioned in passing as China’s first female scriptwriter for Cupid’s Puppets (1925), a Great Wall Film Company film co-directed by her husband, Hou Yao, and Mei Xuechou. The film is noted as the first Chinese film narrated from a female perspective (Li and Hu 143). Great Wall was founded in Brooklyn, New York, by Chinese students studying in the U.S. and then relocated to Shanghai in 1923. Pu had worked for Great Wall as a scriptwriter and as an actress between 1924 and 1926 before she moved on to Minxin Film Company where she wrote her next three screenplays. Although her contributions are rarely discussed or even known, until the late 1920s, Pu was the only woman to be credited as a scriptwriter both in film prints and publicity ads.

Born in Karlskrona in 1868, Marie Louise Gagner was raised in Helsingborg, and died in Stockholm in 1933. She received her diploma from the Teachers College in Stockholm in 1893 and was thus eligible for teaching at upper-level girl schools as well as in co-educational programs. Hired in 1895 at the Teachers Seminar for Normal Schools in Stockholm, she was first an adjunct with tenure and in 1919 she was promoted to the rank of lecturer. Gagner formally retired in 1928. Her life’s work was dedicated to pedagogy and children’s developments and experiences in relation to language acquisition, literature, and popular culture. She was very actively involved in didactic initiatives and a member of many pedagogic bodies. Gagner’s outlooks regarding culture and educational matters were framed by her Christian faith with a feminist slant and its challenges in the face of modernity and modernism.

In 1946, the Seattle Times described the visit of a young Chinese-American filmmaker: “Still in her teens, and with no background of such a venture, Esther went to Hollywood, rented a studio in Sunset Boulevard and made her first picture for Chinese markets here and in China” (n.p.). This may be somewhat of an exaggeration because Esther would have been in her early 20s, but her youth was still remarkable. Once called China’s first woman director by both the Chinese and American press, Esther Eng had been forgotten for twenty-five years after her death when, in the summer of 1995, Todd McCarthy, then chief film critic for Variety, came across her name in the credits of Golden Gate Girl (1941). It was a Chinese film Eng had directed in San Francisco. McCarthy provocatively claimed in the August 21-27 issue of Variety that Eng was “an Asian woman filmmaker who had utterly eluded the radar of the most diligent feminist historians and sinophiles” (10). This statement inspired veteran film critic Law Kar to research and write on Eng’s life and work, and he concludes that “[i]f Eng had worked in the film industry today, she could have easily been seen as a champion of transnational filmmaking, feminist filmmaking, or antiwar filmmaking” (313).

In the 1930s Fanchon Royer was famous for being one of the few female producers in Hollywood, but she got her start in the industry during the silent era as a journalist, publicist, and producer. She was born Fanchon Pauline Royer on January 21, 1902 in Des Moines, Iowa. Her parents, Elwood A. and Jessie Havens Royer, had a contentious relationship and they divorced in 1907, the same year as the birth of their second child, Robert (Royer 1960, 303). She had a peripatetic childhood, moving between her maternal grandmother’s house in Minneapolis, her father’s in Des Moines, and roaming with her restless mother, attending ten different schools in nine and a half years. She was allowed to remain with her father, a prosperous wholesale grocer, long enough to attend East Des Moines High School, where she acted in the senior play and served as the first female editor of the school’s monthly literary magazine, Quill (1960, 303).

Among all the pioneers linked to the birth of cinema in Argentina was the young woman of Italian origins who was to become, as far as we know at the moment, not only the first Argentine woman filmmaker, but also the filmmaker of the first Argentine children’s movie and the first woman to found an academy for film actors in South America: Emilia Saleny. Few records are available for us to piece together her life. Her death certificate, found in the Registro Nacional de las Personas (National Register of Persons in Buenos Aires), states that she died on August 22, 1978 at her home, Calle Caseros 574, the widow of Alberto Olivero, and the daughter of Antonio Saleny and Victoria Pieri. Her nephew José Di Leo declared her death. The certificate indicates that she was an Argentine citizen and her birth date appears as June 26, 1894. The scant critical essays that have remembered her name seldom include biographic details, and those that do, offer inconclusive speculations.

The practice of rendering inter-title cards more decorative and expressive by means of creative typography, ornate borders or other types of illustrative artwork was first picked up by the Swedish film industry around 1919, a few years after it had become established in Hollywood. Swedish audiences were already familiar with so-called “art titles” from imported American films, and the incorporation of this feature into domestic productions partly answered more general calls for Swedish cinema to reinvent itself according to international standards. Furthermore, as had previously been the case across the Atlantic, the emergence of this practice followed debates about the artistic value and usefulness of title cards. Claire Dupré la Tour has argued that art titles along with the success of the “Loos-style” title writing—a reference to the inventive writer Anita Loos—granted the inter-title a more “privileged status vis-à-vis the image” and helped popularize the idea that inter-titles could make a significant contribution to a film’s success. This is as true for the Swedish context as for the American (329).

Caroline van Dommelen directed three fiction films, two of which were co-directed with Léon Boedels, between 1911 and 1912 for the production company Film-Fabriek F.A. Nöggerath in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She was the first woman in the Netherlands to direct films, and was succeeded in this in 1924 by the only other female filmmaker in Dutch silent cinema, Adriënne Solser. According to Geoffrey Donaldson, van Dommelen’s name as the director appeared in the advertisements of all three films (1972, 33). In her reminiscences, a first, five-part, series of which were published in the magazine Het Leven in 1921 and another, four-part, series in the film paper De Rolprent in 1925, she says that she wrote one of the screenplays, acted the female leads and directed the actors while she charged a co-director with supervising the mass scenes (1925, 188; 236). For one film, Vrouwenoogen/Women’s Eyes (1912), she was the sole director. She furthermore acted, between 1911 and 1920, in ten films, in eight of which she took leading roles. Together, these add up to more than 11,000 meters or roughly 33,000 feet of nitrate film of which a mere 368 meters or about 1,000 ft. have been preserved, yet only as fragments of Oorlog en vrede 1914 and Oorlog en vrede 1918 (both 1918), two later films in which she played minor roles. No prints of the films van Dommelen directed survive today.

Today Aleksandra Khokhlova is remembered as the star actress in films directed by Lev Kuleshov in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, at the peak of her career she was at the epicenter of the Soviet avant-garde, an icon of the experimental acting that matched the style of revolutionary montage cinema. Looking back at his life, Kuleshov wrote: “Nearly all that I have done in film directing, in teaching, and in life is connected to her [Khokhlova] in terms of ideas and art practice” (1946, 162). Yet, Khokhlova was much more than Kuleshov’s wife and muse as in her own right she was a talented author, actress, and film director, an artist in formation long before she met Kuleshov.

Daisy Sylvan—the producer, director, and star of two motion pictures, both lost—was born Elena Mazzantini in Rome. She moved to Florence, where she started a film production company, Daisy Film. In 1920, she became the widow of her husband, Francesco Rosso, and the beneficiary of a retirement fund, as we can infer by the registry office certificate only discovered recently (Pepi 2008, 11). Her education is still unknown, though she was not a Florentine nor an aristocrat, as has been erroneously reported by sources until today (Strazzulla and Baldassini 1995-1996, 25-27; Martinelli 1998, 47).

Adela Rogers St. Johns delighted in the fact that James Quirk of Photoplay called her “the mother-confessor of Hollywood” (St. Johns 1976, 11). Her California birth, close association with William Randolph Hearst, and unconventional upbringing gave her an unusual vantage point on the social mores of Hollywood as was born in the 1910s and assumed its mature form in the 1920s. Indeed, St. Johns may be said to have been the most influential of the chroniclers of the Hollywood story of rise and fall inasmuch as she wrote the narrative that became the template for the motion picture What Price Hollywood? (1932) and its later iterations as A Star Is Born (1937, 1954, 1976). She both reported on Hollywood and fictionalized the lives of the stars she covered; thus her significance was as an observer of Hollywood rather than as a participant in it.

Ada Aline Urban is not mentioned in any film histories, but as co-owner and chief financier of the Natural Color Kinematograph Company, she was the leading female figure in British film of her day. She was the seventh of the eight children born to Anton Leon Gorecki, of Polish ancestry, and Margaret Brown. Her father worked as professor of languages at the University of Glasgow. Little is known of her upbringing, but she first married Alexander James Jones, a traveling salesman with the cinematograph and optical firm of Butcher’s & Sons. The couple had two children, Maxwell Jardine and Anna Marguerite, known as Margot. It became an unhappy marriage, and around 1907 she met American film producer resident in Britain, Charles Urban. Each divorced their previous partner, and they were married in February 1910.

Beulah Marie Dix became a writer because it was one of the few respectable options available for women in the early twentieth century. The daughter of a factory foreman from an old New England family, Dix was educated at Radcliffe College, where she graduated with honors and became the first woman to win the prestigious Sohier literary prize. Instead of teaching, she decided to write after she sold some stories to popular magazines. She wrote mainly historical fiction, including novels and children’s books. In 1916, she went to California to visit her theatre agent, Beatrice deMille, mother of film pioneers Cecil and William, who had moved there with the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Film Company, which was that year to become Famous Players-Lasky after a merger with Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players. Dix decided to experiment with writing for the new motion picture industry just for fun, but became a successful and productive silent era scenario writer, as her daughter, Evelyn Flebbe Scott, recalled (7-9).

Although best known as the premiere Hollywood gossip columnist of the classical Hollywood studio era, Louella Parsons began her career in the film industry in 1911 when she was hired by the Chicago-based production company Essanay as its chief scenario editor. Referencing a story published in Louella’s hometown Illinois newspaper the Dixon Telegraph in 1936, Parsons biographer Samantha Barbas writes that, although Parsons’s application for the position was initially discarded, she ingratiated herself with Essanay cofounder George Spoor’s wife, who subsequently persuaded Spoor to hire her. Barbas’s account of Louella’s hire differs slightly from that of Louella herself, put forward in her best-selling 1944 book, The Gay Illiterate. Barbas writes that Louella, upon discovering that her cousin Margaret Oettinger was friendly with Ruth Helms, the daughter of George Spoor’s wife’s closest acquaintance, begged the little girl to introduce her to Mrs. Spoor in exchange for movie tickets. In contrast, Parsons recalls that Helms was so impressed by a scenario she had written entitled Chains that the twelve-year-old took it upon herself to acquire Louella a job in the film industry: “Ruth hounded poor Mrs. Spoor so unmercifully that she, in turn, hounded her busy husband into giving me the appointment.” Parsons notes that Essanay not only hired her as scenario editor, but purchased the scenario for the sum of twenty-five dollars. Although no longer extant, Parsons reports that Chains was produced in 1912 staring Essanay heartthrob Francis X. Bushman (Barbas 2005, 33; Parsons 1944, 20–21).

As with many women in early cinema, such as Jeanie Macpherson and Frances Marion, Dorothy Farnum’s career in Hollywood began with acting before settling into writing. Known for her intelligence and beauty, she worked well in front of the camera. From articles in the Los Angeles Times, we know that she was educated in a convent boarding school (location unknown) where Farnum mastered French history and literature and became fluent in Spanish and German (C27, 33). Although she received several offers to act and even appeared in the films Over Night (1915) and The Cub (1915), she was reported to have instead preferred writing scenarios for the silent screen. Farnum’s scenario writing career began in 1919 when she approached producer Harry Rapf with an original scenario titled The Broken Melody. Impressed with her skills, he employed Farnum at a commission of twenty-five dollars a week. Unfortunately, after just two weeks Farnum proved to be too inexperienced and was released from her contract. Rapf promised to employ her once she attained a footing in the industry and refined her trade. Farnum continued to work for a few years, steadily writing adaptations and scenarios. Finally, as reported in the Los Angeles Times, Rapf rehired her in May 1926 and gave her work on what would become one of her most renowned films: Beau Brummel (1924) starring John Barrymore (C27).

Marian Blackton worked on over fifteen films during her short career as a scenarist and occasional actress. Her father, J. Stuart Blackton, one of the founders of the Vitagraph Company, directed all but two of her scenarios. Marian Blackton became her father’s script girl in 1921, and graduated to scenario writer in 1924. Most of her scenarios were dramas adapted from existing novels or plays.

By the time Margery Wilson reached her late twenties, she had completed her work as a film director. Prior to that, according to autobiographical accounts, she had received a seminary education supplemented in philosophy and literature by her father, actively pursued social-service work, and given one-woman public performances at clubs, schools, and churches in the Cincinnati area. She toured Ohio and south to Atlanta as a leading lady with the John Lawrence players, founded her own theatre company at sixteen years of age, and embarked to London with her sister Mary on an aborted world tour as musical entertainers (Wilson 1956). Then, in 1914, Margery Wilson traveled to Los Angeles and launched her Hollywood career. Today she is best remembered as Brown Eyes in D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), but her motion picture career was extensive, with three dozen roles including many starring performances to her credit.

Bertha Muzzy Bower was perhaps the first female author of mass-market Western fiction. In her lifetime, Bower wrote sixty-eight Western novels under an androgynous nom de plume, a mandate made by her early publisher Street & Smith in order to conceal her gender from readers. While it is difficult to accurately assess the massive popularity of these novels, her works—particularly her Flying U novels—attracted the attention of several Hollywood producers and were regularly adapted into films. Her most popular novel, Chip, of the Flying U, seemed to have been a favorite among moviemakers, as it was adapted four times. As most scholarship on Bower focuses on her literary career, information on her work in cinema remains sketchy and indeterminable. Nonetheless, several sources tell us that Bower was attracted to cinema and particularly to the Hollywood Western. According to Orrin Engen, Bower believed that “the early cowboys of the films projected the essential vitality of life on the range” (11). Outside of the film adaptations, her ties to Hollywood seem tangential at best, though she also worked as a scenario writer and screenwriter, collaborating extensively with director Colin Campbell and cowboy actor Tom Mix.

Ruth Bryan Owen was an orator, a US Democratic congresswoman (1929–1933), and a minister to Denmark and Iceland from 1933 to 1936. She was the daughter of the “Great Commoner” William Jennings Bryan, a three-time Democratic presidential nominee who retired to Florida in the late 1910s. She was married three times, first to Chicago artist William Homer Leavitt, in 1903, then to retired major Reginald Altham Owen, and lastly to the Danish captain Borge Rohde in 1936 (Vickers 59). Between 1919 and 1922, however, she devoted almost all of her energies to filmmaking in Miami, Florida, declaring in a letter dated July 22, 1921, to her friend Carrie Dunlap that she loved nothing as she loved the cinema, and she had finally found her true “métier.” She independently financed, produced, wrote, and directed the feature film Once Upon a Time/Scheherazade (1922), which is now considered lost.

Helen Keller’s brief career in silent film began when she was approached by historian and author of the popular Photographic History of the Civil War Francis Trevelyan Miller, who hoped to write a motion picture script based on Keller’s life and work. Miller, in a January 1918 letter to Keller, argued that the motion pictures were “a universal language” and an opportunity for the deaf-blind author and activist to share her political and social message with the world. Keller, who was often frustrated by the limitations of biographical interest in her life, responded to the broader vision of the project and wrote, typing in her distinctive typing style, back to him in April: “So according to your conception, the interest of our life-drama will not be confined to the events of my life, but will be spread out all round the world [… ] and bring many vital truths home to the hearts of the people, truths that shall hasten the deliverance of the human race.” This rhetoric becomes more pointed in the context of Keller’s public life; she had been a politically active Socialist since 1912.

During the years 1907-1912, Gene Gauntier, the first “Kalem Girl,” was the preeminent figure at the Kalem Film Manufacturing Company. She played key roles in the events that comprise established film history. She wrote the scenario for Ben Hur (1907), the work involved in the controversy that established the first copyright laws covering motion pictures, and wrote and acted in key films. In addition, she acted in the Nan, the Confederate Spy series: The Girl Spy (1909), The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg (1910), The Further Adventures of the Girl Spy (1910), cross-dressing forerunners of the serial action queens. She appeared in The Lad From Old Ireland (1910), the first film shot on location outside of the United States, and in From the Manger to the Cross (1912), the first feature-length treatment of the life of Christ. The Kalem Company was the first to make fiction motion pictures on location around the world, which has meant that 35mm film prints and other documents may have been deposited in archives outside the United States, the best example of which is the Irish Film Archives in Dublin, where one extant Gene Gauntier Feature Players title and five Kalem titles are archived (Condon 2008).

Beatrice deMille was born Matilda Beatrice Samuel in Liverpool, England. She immigrated with her family to New York in 1871. Though her family and friends called her Tillie growing up, when she met Henry deMille, he immediately started calling her Beatrice, after Dante’s Beatrice. According to her son, the director-producer Cecil B. DeMille, when Beatrice told her family that she intended to marry Henry, a Christian, they said they would disown her for converting from her Jewish faith (12). Never one to obey the rules, Beatrice married Henry deMille in Brooklyn, New York, in 1876. Henry had always wanted to be an actor. To make money when they were first married, they both taught—he composition and she elocution—at a preparatory school. When school was out for the summer, they would work as traveling actors, Beatrice always using the stage name Agnes Graham. Programs from a number of the theatrical productions in which they performed are found in the DeMille collection at Brigham Young University. To secure his success as an actor, Henry began writing plays in which he would play the lead role. Soon he formed a partnership with future theatre impresario David Belasco, and the two wrote and produced a number of theatre productions, most of which starred Henry, that were enormously successful. Henry was able to buy a large house in Pompton, New Jersey, for the three children he had with Beatrice—William, Cecil, and Agnes, who would die at age four of spinal meningitis. Then, at the height of his success, according to his obituary, Henry deMille contracted typhoid fever and suddenly died (5).

Between 1904 and 1915, Marion Fairfax wrote several successful Broadway plays before turning to screenwriting. Over the next eleven years, she achieved even greater success in her new field. In 1921, she formed her own production company that produced The Lying Truth (1922), which Fairfax wrote and directed. The most enduring film with which she was associated was The Lost World (1925), a science fiction picture about an isolated land of dinosaurs that featured tremendous special effects. A handwritten note attached to a First National Pictures legal department memo dated December 6, 1923, states: “Fairfax is always a winner—Don’t ever let her get away. Tom [unidentified] knows she is both restless and damn independent.” Three years later, however, Fairfax received her final credit for The Blonde Saint (1926) and then disappeared from filmmaking. She was married to actor Tully Marshall, who died in 1943, for forty-three years.